Slave-Trade Research

 More research in the slave-trade and slavery. An EXCELLENT article by Marley Brown in this month's Archaeology Magazine about the excavations at Christiansborg Castle in Ghana - about what life was like in the sixteenth century, in a slave-trade depot run by European slavers who traded with the local Africans who actually captured and brought in captive fellow-Africans to sell. The evidence of a small but thriving mixed-race community around the castle walls - and the fact that the (Danish, in this case) slavers would often send their mixed-race sons to be educated in Denmark - was absolutely not something I expected to find.

And it brought up - as slave-trade research always does for me - the shocking contrast of the "business-as-usual" images of the people involved in the trade who weren't its victims, but its perpetrators. When I read about the accounting procedures on plantations, or the fact that plantation owners could purchase PRE-PRINTED FORMS to catalog slaves - or, in this case, these thriving little communities of whites and Africans around the trade bases in Africa - I am both horrified and fascinated. I keep wondering, "WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE???"

As I tell my students, the study of History is fascinating, but frequently leads to hatred of humankind.

In other news: The Darwath Trilogy (Time of the Dark, Walls of Air, Armies of Daylight) downpriced in digital through Open Road Media, Monday, Oct. 11 - US and Canada, $2.99.

Comments

  1. Robert PiepenbrinkSeptember 8, 2022 at 6:27 PM

    Bear with us. The whole "empathy with strangers" thing is only about 2,000 years old. We've made some progress, mostly. We've been working on government for at least twice that long with virtually no progress. But if there is not always empathy, there is frequently love. I studied many years ago under the late Dr. George Kren--an Austrian Jewish refugee and noted atrocity expert. He told us that virtually anyone could be gotten to participate in a massacre. (Pardon me if I fail to discuss how this is done.) But he also told us that every member of the Nazi hierarchy was sheltering one or more Jews. Whatever they believed in the abstract, and whatever aided their ambitions, they made exceptions and took risks for people they knew. It's a start.
    If you want to foster hatred of mankind, training in military intelligence may be a better bet than history, and it's much the same skill set.

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